27. Verse 9 And God said, Let the waters under heaven be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so.

Once a person knows of the existence of the internal man and of the external man, and knows that, contrary to appearance, truths and goods flow in from the internal man, or from the Lord by way of the internal into the external, then the things residing in him as cognitions of truth and good are stored away in his memory and registered among the facts there. For anything that finds its way into the memory or the external man, whether natural, spiritual, or celestial, lodges there as known fact, and from that place it is brought out by the Lord. These cognitions are 'the waters gathered together to one place' and are called 'seas'. But the external man itself is called 'the dry land' and immediately afterwards 'earth', as in the verses that follow.

5871. 'Make every man go out from me' means that incompatible and contradictory factual knowledge was to be cast away from the centre. This is clear from the meaning of 'every man from him' as factual knowledge, for the men were Egyptians, and by 'Egyptians' is meant factual knowledge, see 1164, 1165, 1186, 1462, 5700, 5702; and since it was cast aside it follows that it was incompatible and contradictory. For the situation is this: When the truths present in the external or natural man become joined to the good present in the internal man - that is, when the truths of faith are joined to the good of charity - all factual knowledge which is incompatible, and especially that which is contradictory, is cast away from the centre to the sides, thus from the light in the centre to the shadowy parts at the sides. When this happens that knowledge is in part disregarded and in part treated as valueless. But from the remaining factual knowledge which is compatible and harmonious, a kind of extraction - or if one can use the expression, a kind of distillation - takes place, from which the inner meaning of things is obtained, a meaning that no one perceives while in the body except through some joyful feeling, like that experienced at daybreak. Such is the way in which the joining of the truth of faith to the good of charity is effected.